Fixing Consistency With Butter And Salt

Dear Fans, Friends, Fiends, Foes and Family,

Consistency. That is the key word that I need to focus on. I need to produce content here on my blog and while I (think I) have the ingredients all together in one place, just like any other recipe they must be mixed in the right amounts at the right times. There are some recipes that require you to “fold in” an ingredient, like chocolate chip cookies (Which are, just so you know, an acceptable donation to this author. Unless they have nuts. Then you can keep them all to yourself.). You mix everything up, the dry stuff, like the flour, the baking soda and salt in one bowl. Beat the sugar and brown sugar and butter (Real butter, please. God created cows, man created margarine. Yellow vegetable oil is all margarine is and putting it in your cookies is just icky.) and vanilla together, then mix in the eggs one at a time. Add the flour mixture, then, when everything is the right consistency, the last(best) thing you add are the chocolate chips. Do not add nuts. Never add nuts. Herb is nuts enough, maybe?

Sometimes writing is like chocolate chip cookies, really splendid when they come out hot and gooey from the oven and you kind of burn your tongue on them and cool your mouth with an ice cold glass of (whole) milk. They are good when they have just slightly cooled, with a nice hot cup of coffee or another cold glass of milk or an ice-cold Coca-Cola. When they are cooled sufficiently you can store them in a cookie jar if there are any left. And to keep them from getting hard you put a slice of white bread in the jar along with them. As I tell the grandkids, “Yummy to da tummy!”

Sometimes writing is like brussels sprouts. Stinky, icky, nasty little cabbages that I feel confident were created by the devil, but, nonetheless, are much improved with butter and salt.

I also don’t want to have a piece of toast without evenly spread butter. They mock me because I have to spread the butter evenly onto every inch, every corner, of the toast but I don’t care, I know what’s good. If for some kind of unknown reason you don’t have bacon or bacon grease you should fry my eggs, over medium, thanks, with butter. Fried eggs with buttered toast, bacon and a tall, cold glass of milk. Ooooohhh…Yeah!

Popcorn without enough butter and salt is just styrofoam.

Now, another thing you can do is affect the consistency of a lot of recipes by altering the butter content. Add more butter, take out some butter, you get different results. But one thing is certain; you have to have enough butter.

Herb, are you leading up to a point with all this or are you just trying to milk this analogy for all you can?

Okay, okay. The point is that you can have so many good things with butter. And you can write so many good things if you sit your butt, er, in the chair with consistency and just write.